Interdisciplinary Communication
Work with project collaborators and conduct informational interviews with librarians to gain a more holistic understanding of how DH projects function on both a technical and community level in order to facilitate future collaborations on digital humanities and UX design projects.
“Abydos,” The Emma B. Andrews Diary Project
TEI Historical Markup Language
Once I settled on February 1913 as the focal point for marking up, I downloaded all associated materials, including the finished EBA vol.19 XML files that I would be using as a guide for completing the historical markup language on A Winter on the Nile and Some Further Accounts. At first, I found the level of granularity a little daunting, but after a while I found the following steps an effective means of approaching the work.
1. Prepare the text for the Historical Markup Tool. For A Winter on the Nile, this was a fairly simple process because OCR moved the text from pdf to text file effectively. This was not the case with Some Further Accounts, however, and I did need to transcribe that document in order to move to forward.
Example of the text from A Winter on the Nile
Example of the text from Some Further Accounts
2. Process through Audrey Holmes' historical markup tool, created for her Masters thesis in computational linguistics in 2019. The tool automatically assigns coding to the elements of the text which saves time and reduces the percent of human error.
3. Within the Github desktop, open a new branch within the EBA tagged volumes for the new file. Once this is established, open the file in Visual Studio code and paste the formatted text generated by the historical markup tool.
{note} I found myself tripped up almost immediately in Visual Studio Code. The software was recommended in the tutorial video because of the ability for the user to enable color coding that would differentiate between tags and text, but I found that the only way to enact this within the settings required coding.
Example text in Visual Studio Code once Rainbow Tags plug-in was enabled
Luckily, I was able to find a workaround by installing the Rainbow Tags plug-in, which provided the same capabilities. This was especially helpful during the coding process because the fonts of tags changed colors when they were nonfunctioning, such as when they were not properly nested within an <opening> and </closing> tag.
4. Begin proofreading the coding. I found it easiest to approach this process in two steps, first structural and then grammatical. In the structural edit, I added the encoding declaration, TEI Header and front and back matter to the document, as specified in the EBA Markup Instructions manual. I would also add breaks between pages, entries and paragraphs.
In the grammatical edit, I would zoom in to make sure that all of the tags were correctly assigned. I found that there would be some ambiguity in the historical markup tool's designation of place, person and organization names. There were also words that wouldn't be recognized as names, such as Sugar, one of Mary's horses back in Indianapolis and names that shifted meaning depending on their usage, such as Rameses III (the boat) and Rameses III (the Pharaoh).
5. Once I felt that both edits were completed to the best of my ability, I committed and published the material to Github where the other team members can view and edit the documents towards future iterations.
I am glad that I pushed myself to understand this technological aspect of the repository's functionality. Although elements are still a little intimidating and I am sure that my first attempt was not a flawless one, the experience has given me a better grasp of the moving parts involved in the collection, increased my technical vocabulary and ability to communicate and convey ideas for future digital humanities projects.
Informational Interviews
In addition to the excellent collaborative experience that I gained by working with James, Vincent and Sarah, I also had the opportunity to conduct informational interviews with UW Digital Scholarship Librarian Verletta Kern and Research Commons Librarian Elliot Stevens.
Both Verletta and Elliot were incredibly kind and generous with their time. We discussed possible pathways from digital humanities to larger institutions, job title keywords to keep an eye out for, as well as networking possibilities, including list serves and annual meetings to attend.
One product of the interviews that I am really looking forward to is a possible collaboration with Elliot Stevens on the composition and assistance with some digital humanities workshops. When I was speaking with Verletta, we talked about the importance of becoming comfortable with at least some level of education in order to be successful in digital humanities librarianship, whether it is towards community outreach or introducing new tools and methods to other departments. This happened to come up again in my interview with Elliot and a plan to collaborate on workshops may develop at the beginning of the fall quarter.